Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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17.4.14

In the final analysis, the Mr. Smith Goes to Washingtonmeme
that played in the media early on about Rep. Vance McAllister was at least
half correct, and the inaccurate part may explain why he could retain the job
should he stay the course and run for a full term.

The fictional Sen. Jefferson
Smith and McAllister parallel more than in the fact neither visited Washington,
D.C. before assuming their offices. Smith was a complete rube about the ways
Congress worked. He inherited a staff of cynics and manipulators, trying to
keep him from interfering with the agenda they shared with powerful Members. He
let the media use his story in ways to suit their needs to sell papers, even as
this raised ire among his fellow Members of Congress. At one point he let his
affections for a female distract him from doing a good job.

That McAllister shares the
similarity on the last account has become obvious to anyone perusing a politics
headline in the past week, except that in Smith’s case it only caused him to nearly
miss being able to blow the whistle on a crooked scheme, while McAllister’s
game of tongue hockey with a married aide, captured on video released to
the media, makes him appear less than
upstanding and has far greater ramifications. But the other two instances both
expose less obvious yet crucial mistakes as to why he took a job-for-life gig
and put it up for grabs.

16.4.14

So eight legislators snap their
fingers and Gov. Bobby
Jindal overturns educational policy just like that? Well, it’s not quite
that simple to summarize a series of events performed by all parties more to
impact perceptions than substance.

At the beginning of the week, the
legislators fired off a note asserting that, by their reading of a memorandum
of understanding relevant to the Partnership
for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, that Jindal
unilaterally could withdraw the state from the program. PARCC is one of four of
the testing regimes related to the Common Core for State Standards, of which
Louisiana has joined along with 15 other states and the District of Columbia.

After a brief interval, Jindal
announced that, if the Legislature did not do that on its own through
legislation, he thought he could. To which the state’s superintendent of
education John White said Jindal was just one
of three entities that had to approve of this, the other being him and his
employer, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, represented by its
current President Chas Roemer. Neither White nor Roemer favor this, as with the
first PARCC-based testing already underway in the state, with their thinking
that PARCC was more than adequate to do the job, perhaps because it was based
in large part on what Louisiana already was doing, and that starting over would
cost both in tangible terms and in nonpecuniary ways, such as the confusion it
would sow within schools.

15.4.14

Since the Louisiana Legislature
last reviewed the issue last year, the case for Medicaid expansion in the state,
recently
advocated by Sen. Mary
Landrieu, if anything has gotten weaker.

Complementary to Landrieu’s call,
varied legislative Democrat co-partisans of hers have filed several bills that
would, in various ways and to various degrees, force the state into expansion. Yet since similar bills floundered in 2013, three
important developments have occurred that degrade the already insufficient case
for it even further.

One is that the forecast costs of
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), which is related
to expansion continue to spiral out of control. Now the net
cost of $1.5 trillion through 2019 is estimated at almost double the figure
at which it was sold. This only increases the pressure to cost blend the states’
contributions for Medicaid, which for most programs under this umbrella is
computed on a yearly formula that most recently was spit out for Louisiana at
62.26 percent.

14.4.14

Sometimes politics makes one too
clever by half, as is the case with a bill to alter the governance structure of
the East Baton Rouge Parish School District. But also sometimes the limits of
politics forces very imperfect solutions.

While several bills to address the
troubled district, which as of the latest
data ranked in the 23rd percentile in performance, got
introduced into the Louisiana Legislature this session with actions such as
carving out a new community school district and dividing the EBRPSD into four
zones, the one with most traction so far is SB
636 by state Sen. Bodi White. It
would decentralize many governance decisions to the school level, where
principals would be responsible for recruiting and hiring personnel, would oversee
curriculum, instruction methods, and professional development, and with district
oversight be responsible for food services, transportation, custodial, health
and a wide range of other services. Principals would operate under management
contracts of up to five years and be subject to dismissal if they fail to meet
performance goals spelled out in the written agreement. A community council
would provide parental input.

It’s clear that, left to its own
devices in its current form, the EBRPSD will continue to underserve children.
Over the last several years, it has continued to hemorrhage students even as
the parish population has grown and its performance has been stagnant, even as
its per pupil spending (as of the latest data) has
increased nearly 50 percent since the hurricane disasters of 2005, or the ninth
highest of all, while having the twelfth highest per pupil spending. Despite
these facts, the past and present leadership has taken a bifurcated approach as
the district continues to sink: blame its ills on a lack of money but try to
build political support among advantaged families by a “two Baton Rouges”
tactic of creating programs to attract high performing students to make a few strong schools while
ghettoizing the remainder.

The Democrats’ assertion stems
from comparing McAllister’s kissing of a married aide revealed last week to the
admission in 2007 by Republican Sen. David Vitter of committing
a “serious sin,”
widely believed to involve his utilizing a few years earlier prostitution
services. Two prominent Republicans, organizational party leader Roger Villere
and political leader Gov. Bobby
Jindal, have called for McAllister’s resignation, but neither asked the
same of Vitter at the time those years ago. Democrats hope this charge can convey
a (tiny) advantage in its upcoming fall campaigns and perhaps spill over to
Vitter’s run for governor next year.

The political rationale should be
obvious as to the differential treatment by Republicans. McAllister just won a
special election to fill the seat a few months ago, and is best known for complaining
about being a congressman and bucking the party on the high-profile issue of
government involvement in health care. His taking a powder would make for a
wide open race in the fall but heavily favoring Republicans in a year, the
midterm during a president’s second term, they are advantaged, while his
staying in, because of lingering knowledge of the incident of just a few months
earlier, would decrease the chances (even if they still would be favored) of their
holding the position if he were forced into a runoff with a Democrat. The state
party also wants nothing to distract voters from the unfavorable reelection
climate for Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu,
now an underdog
to retain her seat.

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